The National Labor Relations Board halted the effort to unionize Northwestern’s football team without answering the biggest question: Are the players effectively university employees?
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While the NLRB did not formally rule on the central issue of whether the players are in fact employees, electing not to assert jurisdiction, the decision is a serious blow to the athletes’ unionization effort and did not give the Northwestern players the opportunity to appeal.
A landmark bid by Northwestern University football players to unionize was voted down in a final and binding decision from the National Labor Relations Board on Monday.
Northwestern became the focal point of the labour fight in January 2014, when Colter announced plans to form the first U.S. labour union for college athletes.
A local branch of the National Labor Relations Board granted the athletes at the Chicago-area university the right to organize a union since they are considered employees. As Tim Waters of the United Steelworkers said last year, ‘just because [Northwestern is] a good employer doesn’t mean they’re not an employer’.
“Northwestern considers its students who participate in NCAA Division I sports, including those who receive athletic scholarships, to be students, first and foremost”, Cubbage explained.
Northwestern University came out against the football team’s movement and commended the NLRB for its ruling. And the scholarship players do not fit into any analytical framework that the Board has used in cases involving other types of students or athletes. “Both locally at Northwestern, and broadly as chairman of the NCAA Division-I Council, it has been remarkable over the last several years to witness the rapid evolution of college athletics with student-athlete well-being as the top priority”. They did vote, needing a simple majority for approval, though those ballots now will be destroyed without being counted. As a result, the results of the ballots cast on April 25 will not be revealed and the players cannot appeal the decision.
The petition had been filed by the College Athletes Players Association (CAPA).
The NLRB punted on the question about whether college athletes are employees. In theory, football players at USC, a private school, would have been able to unionize, but players from crosstown UCLA, a public school, would not.
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“Our focus is, was, and will continue to be on delivering a world-class experience – academically, socially and athletically – every day for each of our 494 student-athletes”, Phillips said in his statement. The organization cringed at the thought of players actually controlling their destiny – as did universities – and will drag its feet as long as it can before instituting meaningful reforms to govern hours, endorsement deals or health coverage. The Big 10 has also followed Northwestern’s lead in guaranteeing 4-year scholarships to its recruits (NU has done so since 2011). The NLRB noted that the NCAA now allows schools to award guaranteed four-year scholarships instead of one-year renewable scholarships.
